Do You Think
the “War on Terror” Will
Ever End?
By Hazam Kira
CA
On
March 4, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
in his inaugural address, sought to sear hope
into the national consciousness with the following
momentous words, “This is preeminently the
time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly
and boldly… This great Nation will endure
as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Regrettably, since September 11th, political opportunists
of all stripes, shamelessly seized on that horrific
atrocity to re-infuse fear into the national consciousness,
and steer America ’s rage into American
adventurism.
These agenda setters understood that if the indefinite
struggle against terror were framed as a "war"
it would become the ‘master narrative’,
giving them the chance to achieve long held foreign
policy ambitions, and replace one ominous bogeyman
(Soviet Union) with another.
Recent government’s actions against the
sovereign nation of Iraq and elsewhere have been
perceived, by many around the world, as a form
of state terrorism, needlessly perpetuating the
cycle of terror. Former head of the CIA’s
Osama bin Laden unit, Mike Scheuer, in his book
Imperial Hubris, argues that the offensive invasion
and occupation of Iraq was a huge gift to Bin
Laden, lending to the claim that the US is targeting
Islam and the Muslim world.
Since the beginning, leaders such as former Presidential
candidate Patrick Buchanan have held that it’s
time to stop listening to this “cabal of
polemicists and public officials who seek to ensnare
our country in a series of wars that are not in
America ’s interests.” Similarly,
Democratic candidates for the 2008 Presidential
election have recently asserted their firm ambitions
to ending our “War on Iraq ” before
the next Presidential inauguration.
By committing ourselves to a “war”
with an undefined set of parameters, ambiguous
definitions of key terms and objectives, and allowing
ourselves to be repeatedly exploited by political
opportunists, the United States implicates itself
in an untenable and un-winnable "war".
“When Will Those Muslim Suicide Terrorists
Be Quelled?”
In the most scientific study on suicide terrorism,
by Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic
of Suicide Terrorism (2005) many widely held beliefs
on terrorism are thoroughly invalidated. Looking
at every case from 1980 to 2005, the empirical
evidence concludes that there is "little
connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic
fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s
religions. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist
attacks have in common is a specific secular and
strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to
withdraw military forces from territory that the
terrorists consider to be their homeland".
Speaking truthfully, we cannot solve extremism
on one end without addressing it on the other.
As horrendous as any form of terrorism is, challenging
it only on one end is not only futile but self-deceptive
and inevitably counterproductive.
(Hazem Kira works closely with the nation's leading
American Muslim leaders, grassroots organizations,
and academics. He works as a Political Consultant
and can be reached at hazemkira@yahoo.com)
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